Of Decay
by Aiffe
Summary: Now there are two holes in the world: the sister that lived, and the sister that died. Is it any wonder that they seek to nullify one another? [Kagura x Kanna yuri, manga chapter 375 spoilers.]
1. Hands

A/N: This is all for you, my darling Raihu, and I know you don't need to be warned. You picked the subject matter, after all. But for the rest of you, beware gory descriptions and underage yuri.

Hands

A child's stature suits Kanna. Legs too small to follow, too short to run for help, suited only for kneeling endlessly at her master's side. Arms that cannot reach out, hands that fall short of another's touch, always bent inward to her mirror, with which she shields her vulnerable stomach. It was not by Naraku's design that she appeared this way, rather it was the outcome of her own nature. Skin unlined by smile or frown, an expanse as smooth as the gray surface of her inexperienced brain.

She had liked Kagura's hands.

Kagura's hands that fluttered with the interest of birds newly revived by spring. Hands tipped by deft claws that Kanna could imagine scoring the skin of enemies and lovers with equal passion. Caught in a flurry, slipping into her kimono, whipping about her fan, expressing the need she felt where words were inadequate, those were the hands that Kanna remembered.

Hands are very important.

Naraku's beautiful hands, folded elegantly in his lap, needed little provocation to become the spidery things they really were. His fingers in a fight became long, rigid claws like wasps' stingers, incongruous with his still-human arms. His hands, like him, covered their cruel nature with deception.

Hakudoushi, like Kanna, had the short child-arms that could never reach out to another, but his were made to hold a weapon, and in doing so, become one with that weapon; his hands were a blade, sharp and long-reaching.

Mouryoumaru's arms were long with wanting, needing to reach out, but his hands were mutilated and unusable save as hooves in the long path he had before him.

Kanna had once uncurled one pale finger very carefully in Kagura's direction, like a mushroom growing towards whatever can be grown towards in a lightless place; perhaps merely in the opposite direction of gravity. Kagura, of course, had not noticed, captivated instead by her own fast, capricious movements.

Kanna could not remember what those hands had held as they disintegrated, what those bones had held before they'd been burned to black smoke and fine white dust.

She hopes it was _nothing_.


	2. Heart

Heart

Naraku could form a face easily enough. He could make hair, and limbs, and muscles and skin and cruelty and anger, but the part he had the most trouble with, the part he himself least understood, was the heart.

Kanna, his first venture into the art of making, was acardiac. No heart. No blood. Void resided in her arteries, and gave her power. An elegant solution to Naraku's shortcomings. She was never intended to have a heart, and her life force was tied into his own. That was why loyalty to him was a priority in her design, because she was the one person he could not kill.

But cold and dark and void are not things. They are absences, and they yearn to equalize. Kanna wanted a heart for no other reason than that she didn't have one, and she felt it, like cold things soaking up any available heat. Not a true emotion, but the nature of the vacuum.

When she first saw Kagura's heart, she assumed that it had been made for her. Entranced, she watched it beat bloodlessly, and stroked a pale finger along the supple musculature. Naraku had to keep it on his highest shelf from then onward, out of her reach.

Reaching was something Kanna wasn't good at. She would kneel beneath the shelf and listen to it beat, like a motherless puppy with a clock.

But it was not for her.

When the heart was used for Naraku's true purpose, Kanna felt the void. Silence is the absence of sound, and yearns for sound. She missed it with a lack of emotion that itself yearned for emotion.

Death is the absence of life, and Kanna yearned for life the way that only those who have never had it can. In death, deathless, she was immortal, and as long as Naraku lived could never know what it was to embrace true life and true death.

Kagura's fate did not frighten her, as one without life cannot perceive death as bad. Rather, she admired Kagura's way of both living and dying, as she had admired her heart so long ago.

Betrayal of Naraku was unthinkable to her, and yet...

Kanna longed to be warm, to flow with blood and to decay.


	3. Mouth

Mouth

Naraku did not leave all of Kanna's forming to her discretion. He required that she have a mouth, for all his servants must speak, and the first word is _master_.

Kanna, of course, duly obeyed. Her mouth formed as a thin slit in her face, colorless, without whimsy or aesthetic flair, and able to give off a thin, toneless voice.

The very first thing Kagura did upon her creation was spit. She spat until she spat blood as well, and stained her lips with it. Naked, she kicked the lumps of spare flesh that had not been used in her body, and with foam on her mouth spoke her first word.

_Why?_

And when Naraku took her by the hair to discipline her, Kanna knelt in her wake, in her blood and spit, trails of color creeping up her dress the way a plant draws up water. She dipped a finger in the blood, and outlined her own lips with it, but in the time it took to turn her mirror on herself and inspect the results, all traces of the blood were gone.

That is the other nature of the mouth. It hungers. It consumes.

Not knowing the nature of Kagura's body, Kanna wondered if unlike herself, she ate, and if so, what? Would that ravenous mouth devour plate after plate of fish and rice like a human's would? Would she suck the blood of the living like a spider? Would she steal out in the night, and take what she needed from the bodies of others? What force kept the bright crimson on those lips, vivid as blood, redder than the mouth of any human?

Since the mouth also digests, she would try to catch Kagura's exhalations, analyzing for the scent of fish, of blood, of anything that might have caught between her teeth and rotted. Her breath did carry a scent, but one that Kanna could never place, one that didn't quite fit into the world as she knew it. It reminded her almost of smoke--not as if she had been sitting by a fire or smoking a pipe, but as if her body itself was on fire, and the scent was not of the flame but of her body's kindling slowly dissipating with every wisp of breath.


	4. Absentia

_Absentia_

It is easy for Kanna to slip away. She is not a traitor. Naraku does not scrutinize her comings and goings. And after all, it is true that Kanna does not leave with the intent of betraying her master. Her reasons are personal, though Naraku had always assumed that nothing was personal to Kanna.

She travels light. No provisions or shelter are needed, not even a change of clothes. She tries to leave the mirror, wanting to see with her own eyes for once, but her fingers persistently refuse to be severed from the object they have always held. No matter; she will hardly feel the burden of it.

She walks out of the stronghold unchallenged, and into the free wind. But it is not as they say; she doesn't sense Kagura here. Kagura whose life bled away through moist, crimson lips, Kagura whose heart pounded deep inside the castle when enemies came to call, Kagura who made tight fists to restrain herself, her long nails which dug into her soft, unused palms and made a row of red crescents. Kagura of the flesh, Kagura with warm skin and hair that could tangle, the lissome body that had stalked alongside her own. This Kagura was not here, and could never exist in the wind. Kanna could not believe that that body could so easily fall to nothing and assimilate into the air.

No. If that body had indeed died, then surely it would decay. It would have to continue to exist, dead, giving off the odor of rot and slowly becoming something that was not Kagura, that was not a body, but had all the physical weight and veracity that had once been Kagura's.

Kanna does not go to the place of Kagura's death. She has seen everything in her mirror, but no longer believes everything her mirror tells her. Seeking the root of things, Kanna goes instead to the place where they were created, where they had once lived together in silent companionship. Kanna goes to the abandoned castle with the long swipe of _kaze no kizu_ torn through its center.

Almost appropriate, she thinks, surveying the devastation. The wind's wound, the wind's scar, carved into the body of the place where Kagura was born.

There are bodies here. There is death here.

Kagura's victims, her hapless puppets, lie strewn around rotting, all former allegiances forgotten. Men lie peaceably with wolves, all untouched in this place where nothing grows and beasts fear to tread, and all equally dead. Only the graves of the taijiya lie open, disinterred to lie beneath less tainted ground.

From inside the ruins, Kanna hears the familiar snap of a fan flicked open, and her back stiffens, wondering if she imagined it, if she is _capable_ of imagining it, when the first corpse stirs.

This is Kanna's old home, the spawning ground for all wonders dark and macabre. And here, Kagura's slaves rise to dance one last time. First slow, then fast, unreasonably fast and whirling about her. Kanna is still the whole while, her body unable or unwilling to move to the fast tempo they set, only watching them and feeling a rising tension as the dead man's dance passes where she stands and surrounds her like the rising sea.

In between the dancers, Kanna catches a glimpse of her, directing them with her fan and partaking in the festival to which she is mistress. It seems that every time another dancer interrupts her view, the Kagura Kanna sees on the other side is somehow changed, now laughing and cavorting, now coldly domineering, and for an instant, her face leering with holes of decay, the skin eroding around the blackened flesh, like some other, deformed face superimposing itself over the one Kanna knows—but then only Kagura again, looking alarmed as the hordes of the dancing dead sweep her away with them.

Reluctantly, Kanna falls back on the crutch of looking in her mirror. What she sees there does not surprise her, though it is disappointing. The dead lie as dead as ever, and Kagura, her Kagura is absent. When she looks up again at the grisly festivities, she sees Kagura look over her shoulder at her, as if surprised but pleased to find her there.

For the very first time, Kanna lets go of her mirror. She isn't able to place it down nicely, but loosens her grip just enough for it to fall through her hands, flinching only slightly to hear the spine-jarring crash of its landing. She doesn't look down to see if it's broken. She will either look now, and the rebellion will end as quietly as it began, with her holding on to that mirror for the rest of her existence, or she will continue, and walk away without ever looking back. And she's already chosen.

Kagura takes Kanna's hands in her own-something they'd never been able to do before-and pulls her into a place like the eye of a storm, where the dances move slowly around them, and it seems like nothing can touch them.

Kanna knows that this is what she came for, more than she ever could have hoped for, but unfortunately, she also knows that it cannot be real. Her desire to be deceived is greater than her capacity for it. Faithless, she cannot help but say, "You died."

Kagura does not deny this, but wonders aloud what difference that makes, particularly to creatures such as themselves.

"Am I..." Kanna struggles to remember the word, so rarely used in her thoughts, "dreaming?"

Kagura shrugs. "I'm really the wrong person to ask. It's getting harder and harder for me to tell the difference."

Frustrated, Kanna allows herself to be led about the grounds. Banter was never her strong suit, and against Kagura's quick tongue, she knows her questions will go unanswered. As before, she relishes Kagura's presence, without being able to do anything but passively accept whatever Kagura wants to give her. She briefly wonders if she, without ever meaning to, has become a traitor now as well, and what Naraku will do about it.

But then, as she sees the corpses settle down at dawn, she knows that she has worried needlessly.

Naraku will never touch her. However, it is a revelation that brings her no relief.

The dead have nearly all returned to their natural state, now. "Are you leaving soon?" Kanna asks tentatively, only their fingertips still touching.

"Yes," Kagura says, exalted, her face full of sky.

"Take me with you," Kanna whispers.

"Oh," Kagura says, gentle to the point of being pitying, "but there's nowhere for you to go."

"Then take me to Nowhere," Kanna pleads, her voice still uninflected, giving no indication that she understands the gravity of her own words.

Kagura kneels before Kanna, buffeted by a wind that seems to be for her alone. "You don't say things lightly, do you," she asks rhetorically.

"Take me," Kanna repeats, not like a sentence in its own right, but a bit of something else broken off, a fragment that can never be understood on its own. Implied are things her tongue will never contort to say, things that will always remain trapped in the hole where her heart should have formed, things that don't belong in the wispy girl-body she made for herself.

Kagura's hand strokes her face, and Kanna feels something pass through her touch, something she's never felt before. Pain or pleasure, she should have screamed from it, but she had never learned to react to sensation. It reminds her slightly of when Kagome cracked her mirror, only more intense.

Ever so slightly, her breath hitches in her throat, as Kagura presses a kiss to her lips. Kanna is certain she is drowning, she is burning, she is being torn asunder, but can do nothing but try to complete her last sentence with a certain urgency, "..._with_ you."

Her tongue is dry, and there's no more air. Words wither inside her unspoken, unrealized, to make way for the unnameable feeling that goes with Kagura's touch.

Kagura's hands, gripping her arms like birds' feet perching, leaving bruises that Kanna will later realize are not bruises at all, Kagura's mad hammer pulse, sounding from the one place it's never been heard before, Kagura's mouth, whispering apologies with one breath, and leaving searing marks on her flesh with the next.

Kagura gone.

Kagura, a void that air cannot fill. A void that Kanna herself could lose herself in, and never return from. She knows then that that's why she could see her-because Kagura had truly vanished into nothing, leaving a hole in the world. There was no body, no essence, no dust, no reincarnation.

Kanna, weakening, bends to kneel. She sees her arms traced with cruel black marks stemming from where Kagura had touched her, and does not fail to notice their rapid growth. It looks as if the flesh is simply dying of its own accord.

Her lips still tingle with the weight of Kagura's kiss.

She is neither surprised nor angry. It had been her request, after all. But now that her body is dying and crumbling away, she would have liked to cry, even just one tear slipping down her stony face, or if nothing so romantic, then a scream of agony born of the physical torment she so calmly endured. Wasn't there some sort of emotional compensation for her sacrifice? By making her own decision, she should be free. She should show some sign of humanity, something worth being mourned.

She should say, "I love!" and "I hate!" in between great wailing sobs. There is nothing left to hold her back.

But there is only Kanna, watching her body be destroyed in a sort of detached way, wondering how long it would take, wondering if there was something she ought to be doing about it, and even occasionally wondering if Naraku would consider it a betrayal. She still feels no animus towards Naraku, and hopes he won't think badly of her, but she has gone out and destroyed something he found useful, and had worked hard on making.

Vaguely, she wonders if she will die alone. It looks that way. But unlike Kagura, she has lived alone, touching no one. It's probably better this way. There's no one left in this world worth seeing again, anyway.

The beauty of the collapse of her body is a testament to Naraku's work. She watches the skin slip away, followed by the delicate winding musculature, until finally the bones blacken and crack, and without supports, fall away. She wants to see Kagura beckoning before she loses what little hold she has left on this world, but that too is a disappointment.

It takes her most of that morning to die. She has opportunity to watch birds and beasts go about their business as if her plight meant nothing, not even showing the consideration of wanting to scavenge her bones. Kanna herself waits patiently, as she often does when she knows Naraku is about to say something important and she should not interrupt, but has no strong feelings about it one way or the other.

But no words come.

When the midday sun beats down on the blackened husk lying mere feet from the place where it was created from nothingness, a strong wind blows. But Kagura is not there. Kagura isn't anywhere.

And, _in absentia_, Kanna is with her.


End file.
